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Coulomb Bound States of Strongly Interacting Photons

Physicists have taken another step toward building objects out of photons. In the latest issue of Physical Review Letters, a team based in the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and University of Maryland has shown theoretically that, by tweaking a few parameters of the binding process, photons could travel side by side at a specific distance from each other. The arrangement is akin to the way that two hydrogen atoms sit next to each other in a hydrogen molecule.

The team includes Harvard Physics graduate Alexey Gorshkov (surrently at NIST), Harvard grad student Soonwon Choi, Prof. Mikhail Lukin, and several collaborators from other institutions.